He was a good Lani, a good father, a kindly, brown-eyed giant of a man, quick to grin, to play, to tease. I had loved him with all my heart, and I missed him every day.
“I’ll always keep you safe, Anglet,” he had said. “I’ll always be there to look after you.”
The only lie he ever told me.
I was already grown up when he died, already working, but till then and in spite of everything I went through in the Seventh Street gang, I had never felt truly alone. Papa had always been there, a buffer between me and my sisters, my work, the world in general, ready with a touch, a word, a smile that calmed my raging blood, dried my tears, and told me that all would yet be well. Always. He was my rock, my consolation, and my joy. When Papa looked at me, the universe made sense, and all the words the others hurled at me fell harmless at my feet or blew away like smoke.
He died in a mining accident with four other Lani men. He was trying to reach two apprentices who had been trapped by a rockfall, but the new passage they opened released a pocket of gas. There was an explosion. It took a week to get to the bodies after the shaft collapsed, and I was not allowed to see him. His remains were burned, as is our custom, and the ash strewn over the river, save for one fragment of bone that was interred in the hard, dusty grounds of the temple.
Two years to the day.
I have been alone ever since. I believe the two apprentices were found unharmed.
Tanish came with me to the grave, eyeing me sidelong and careful not to make noise. Partly he was trying to show respect, but it was also the place that left him subdued. He had seen enough death for one day. I would have told him to leave me to my thoughts, but a family of hippos had taken over the riverbank below the temple, and a Lani woman had been killed by one of them when she went to draw water only a couple of weeks before. I didn’t want him wandering alone, so I let him hover awkwardly at my back as I found the marker and knelt down, sitting on my heels.
Someone had placed crimson tsuli flowers on the grave, bound with gold cord. They were fresh and lustrous, hothouse grown at this time of year. Expensive.
Vestris.
It had to be. I felt a quickening of my pulse as I sensed my sister’s presence, and my eyes flashed hungrily around the graveyard as if she might still be there. But she was gone, and my disappointment felt suddenly shameful. Deflated, I adjusted the flowers and focused on the stone marker, feeling young and alone.
Family is family.
Except when it’s gone.
I said nothing, feeling the coin I wore on a thong around my neck.
All steeplejacks wore something that connected them to their past. It was a claim to a version of yourself that wasn’t about the work. Berrit’s had been his sun-disk pendant. Mine was an old copper penny Papa gave me. It had been misstamped and bore the last king’s head on both sides. The Seventh Street boys thought I kept it for luck, because I could flip the coin and always guess correctly what would come up, but I didn’t. I kept it because Papa gave it to me and because when he did, he said, “Because it’s rare. Like you, Ang. One of a kind.”
He thought I was special. I wasn’t, but he believed otherwise, and that almost made it true.
Now I turned the coin over and over in my fingers, and the face embossed on its twin sides became his in my mind so that I pressed it to my lips and closed my eyes like a little kid who thought that wishing might bring him back.
I had never lived in Rahvey’s house, but those refuse-blown streets with the sour smell of goats and the stagnant reed beds by the river were all too familiar. Whenever I went back to the Drowning now, all I found was what was gone, the spaces Papa had left behind him. No wonder I hated the place. It was a land of ghosts, of absences.
I had learned long ago not to cry, no matter the hurt in your hands or your heart. Tears in the city gangs meant fear and weakness, and they were punished without mercy. I knew that, and I knew that after this morning, Tanish needed me to be strong.
But this was hard.
Harder than I had expected. It had been, after all, two years. The grief at first, coupled as it was with shock and horror, had been almost unbearable, but over the subsequent weeks and months, it lessened. In my childish imagination, I figured it would continue to fade, like a distant ship sailing beyond the reach of vision until it disappeared entirely. But it hadn’t, and I saw now, kneeling on the sandy dirt and staring at the roughly carved stone that bore his name, that it never would. I would always be straining to see him, reaching for him, and he would never be there. I would carry his absence like a hole in my heart forever.